Text drawing engine has been optimized and recoded to allow automatic letter spacing, no more awkward letter spacing and whatnot. Some letters have been redrawn to make it easier to read.

Minor NPC following scripts have been added, they have some debug information in them to help me find out why it doesn't work right.

Layering is done via 3 layers and the Y position. Basically, if a sprite is above the player Y-center , it goes a layer behind. If it is lower than the player Y-center, it goes infront.

Scenes can be designed to allow use of this feature, maybe for something like railings and trees.

I am keeping the text at very fast speeds and skippable via mash, because I know some people just don't want to read. And I really feel unfair for them to read all the time, rather than for them to enjoy gameplay.

Been optimizing the script, and using "engine step size" (Which would be a cool feature to emulate SNES/NES lag), to see where the script makes the NPC's move wrong.

I maintain that it would be worth your time to learn to implement A* for this purpose (either writing the algorithm yourself, or using any of the A* extensions). The learning curve is a bit steeper than other common features, but I can see the complexity of your script ballooning as you add more features to your game's world.

Hey, this is looking really cool so far, looks like you're making good progress too! I played the test and it seems like pathfinding is already working pretty well, so I'm excited to see it working even better. Looks like you have a pretty good handle on how to organize everything.

Are these graphics indicative of what the game will be like? Seems like you're going for an EarthBound/Mother-like, do you have any cool ideas in store for the battle system? Excited to see someone making an RPG with Stencyl!

There is indeed influence of MOTHER in there (Especially the third installment), the grey pixels in the outlines were influenced by the Mario and Luigi game on the Game Boy (Superstar it was called? Bad memory)

I was thinking of doing a speed battle thing, where the faster you select your options the more of a damage multiplier you'll get. Since the musical battles are actually a owned feature by Nintendo, and of all companies you want to fool with, it's not them.

PS: I actually had the 3DS VC port of Earthbound next to me to examine how the pathfinding works. I moved around in each direction, and wrote down how I assume the hierarchy might work.